Of course. You have a knack for pushing my buttons. 8^D
What irritates me about all this active inference and predictive processing advocacy [⛧]
is well-represented in the title of that chapter "From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher
Cognition". [grrrr] The reason I took the time to download it and start skimming it
was my hope for a thorough *composition* from the very small-fast feedback loops to the
large-slow ones. There are a lot of citations. So maybe the clues are in there. But I'm
lazy.
What I *want* ... what I really really want is evidence of predictive
processing in a minimal model organism like C. Elegans or Drosophilia. Such
exist [1-5]! But now we need something like connectome (or simpler?) circuits
in more complex organisms that show how small-fast predictive processing
composes into large-slow predictive processing. Does the model work at *all*
scales? Only some scales? Is it like a percolating stew of predictions, some of
which are suppressed by the larger circuits?
Speaking of which, I discovered this book just last night:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/from-human-reasoning-to-belief-an-empirical-account-joshua-mugg/de6c8394b4e24d99?ean=9781032736952
But as always, it's silly to keep buying books I'll never read. I post it here in the
hopes that you readers out there might read it and tell me what it says ... or maybe I'll
buy the epub and feed it to Claude ... or maybe it's read it already? I haven't checked.
You'll remember we've had such arguments before, when you claimed I *must* believe in the
floor in order to get out of bed in the morning. And my counter was that it is my *doubt*
about the existence of the floor that allows me to get out of bed. IDK if Mugg's "DJ
mixing board" model fits one of our stances better. But I do like it better than the
overly simplistic fast vs slow thinking model.
[1] Dimakou A, Pezzulo G, Zangrossi A, Corbetta M. The predictive nature of
spontaneous brain activity across scales and species. Neuron. Published online
March 1, 2025. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2025.02.009
[2] Kaplan H, Nichols A, Zimmer M. Sensorimotor integration in Caenorhabditis
elegans: a reappraisal towards dynamic and distributed computations.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
2018;373. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0371
[3] Kim A, Fitzgerald J, Maimon G. Cellular evidence for efference copy in
Drosophila visuomotor processing. Nature neuroscience. 2015;18:1247-1255.
doi:10.1038/nn.4083
[4] Lin A, Witvliet D, Hernandez-Nunez L, Linderman S, Samuel A, Venkatachalam
V. Imaging whole-brain activity to understand behavior. Nature reviews Physics.
2022;4:292-305. doi:10.1038/s42254-022-00430-w
[5] Wang S, Segev I, Borst A, Palmer S. Maximally efficient prediction in the
early fly visual system may support evasive flight maneuvers. PLoS
Computational Biology. 2019;17. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008965
[⛧] It seems to me that most of the peri-Friston work borders on advocacy of
the model(s) as opposed to challenging them. But I'm not a scholar. So my scope
is very small.
On 7/6/26 8:15 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Hi, Glen,
I liked the predictive processing thing. It coheres with an idea I have been
kicking around of late. People tend to think of cognitive processes as putting
us in touch with the world as it is. Then we look at that represented world
and make decisions about the future. Wouldn't it make more sense for cognitive
processes to put us in touch with the world as it is going to be? To translate
that back into monist talk, we live in a world of successive anticipations.
As I get more frail, I become aware of all the hard work my cerebellum must be
doing to anticipate the consequences of any action I might take that changes my
center of gravity. A delayed prediction can lead to my taking actions that
compound a balance prediction and send me to the floor. it's like I am doing
judo to myself.
Is that annoying enough to feed the beast?
Nick
On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 6:31 PM glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It's so dead, here, I figure it can't hurt to post arbitrary nonsense I've
run across lately:
Meningeal lymphatic architecture and drainage dynamics surrounding the
human middle meningeal artery
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113693>
Constructing a lower-bound estimate of the global number of insect species
on a hyperdiverse empirical foundation
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123
<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2524283123>
Predictive Processing: From Sensorimotor Skills to Higher Cognition
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011
<https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15999.003.0011>
As always, I'm reading them in fitful bursts, interleaved across each other
and all the other open tabs and crap strewn about my desk. So .... grain of
salt and all.
--
8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
--
8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
